Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant

By Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl

Philosophy and space travel are characterized by the same fundamental purpose: exploration. An essential guide for both philosophers and Trekkers, Star Trek and Philosophy combines a philosophical spirit of inquiry with the beloved television and film series to consider questions not only about the scientific prospects of interstellar travel but also the inward journey to examine the human condition. The expansive topics range from the possibilities for communication among different cultural backgrounds to questions about the stoic temperament exhibited by Vulcans to Ferengi business practices. Specifically chosen to break new ground in exploring the philosophical dimensions of Star Trek, these articles boldly go where no philosopher has gone before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Court
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780812697049

Book preview

Starfleet Directive ONE

Seek Out New Ideas: Major Philosophical Themes in Star Trek

1

From Shakespeare to Wittgenstein: Darmok and Cultural Literacy

PAUL A. CANTOR

In October, 2005, I saw a world-class production of Othello at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C., with Avery Brooks in the title role. The casting of the man who played Commander Sisko in Deep Space Nine seemed to be establishing a Star Trek tradition for Shakespeare in our nation’s capital. Eight years earlier Patrick Stewart—who played Captain Picard in The Next Generation—had appeared as Othello on the same stage in an experimental production that reversed the racial roles—with a white Othello and a black Iago. I began to wonder if Brent Spiner—who played Data in The Next Generation—would soon be appearing as the first android Othello, with perhaps the Borg Collective as a particularly mean Iago.

The Brooks Othello was a good reminder of the longstanding connection between Star Trek and Shakespeare, and hence of the show’s aspirations to cultural literacy. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country takes its subtitle from Hamlet and is filled with quotations from Shakespeare.⁹ The Klingon General Chang is played by Christopher Plummer, a famous Shakespearean actor perhaps best-known, as it happens, for the Iago he played opposite James Earl Jones’s Othello on Broadway. What is less well-known is that early in Plummer’s career, when he played Henry V in Stratford, Ontario, his understudy was a young ambitious Canadian actor named William Shatner, who of course went on to play Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek. No wonder his replacement at the helm of the Enterprise turned out to be Patrick Stewart, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation.

Stewart’s familiarity with Shakespeare came in handy during the shooting of a third season Next Generation episode called The Defector. It opens with a scene of Data learning more about being human by role-playing in the holodeck. Stewart suggested that Spiner do a scene from Shakespeare’s Henry V, the one where the king passes among his soldiers the night before the decisive battle of Agincourt. After getting through the scene, Data tells Picard—in one of those typical Star Trek sequences of familiar and then unfamiliar names that assures us there will be life beyond the twentieth century: I plan to study the performances of Olivier, Branagh, Shapiro and Kullnark. Star Trek likes to remind us of the timelessness of Shakespeare, and indeed Henry V—with its exploration of the problem of language and translation—turns out to be profoundly relevant to the series in all its incarnations.

Something very strange happens in the middle of the play—a couple of French people come out on stage and start to speak in French:

Katherine: Alice, tu as été en Angleterre, et tu bien parles les langage.

Alice: Un peu, madame.¹⁰

And much to our amazement—and initial consternation—the French princess and her attendant continue to speak in French for the entire scene. Shakespeare violates a theatrical convention that seems to be as old as drama itself. Ever since the characters in Aeschylus’s The Persians spoke Attic Greek instead of Persian, it has been customary for drama to be written in the language of the audience viewing the play and not that of the land where it takes place.

Shakespeare being Shakespeare, he is able to make a scene in French work for an English audience. What we are witnessing turns out to be a little language lesson. Katherine anticipates that diplomatic necessities may soon require her to be fluent in her enemy’s tongue. As Katherine mentions the names of the various parts of the body in French, Alice tells her their names in English, thus allowing Shakespeare’s audience to follow along. The premise of the scene is that one language translates easily into another because two different languages simply name the things of the world differently. All that is involved in learning a new language is to find out how it names the things with which one is already familiar—what one might call in pop culture terms the Me Tarzan, you Jane view of language acquisition.

Shakespeare’s momentary violation of one of the most fundamental linguistic conventions of drama only highlights how widespread the practice actually is. Its scope became positively intergalactic in the twentieth century, as science fiction dramas in movies and television sought to extend communication, not just between different nations on Earth, but between humans and species from other planets. Basically, despite a few acknowledgements of the difficulties of inter-species communication, we have learned from Flash Gordon to Buck Rogers, from Star Trek to Star Wars, that everyone in the cosmos speaks English, often with less of an accent than Chekov or Scotty.

Science fiction writers cannot fall back on the premise that makes French-English translation seem to work so easily in Henry V. Whatever their differences, the French and the English share the same human body, and as long as their languages refer to a single underlying reality, one can move between them smoothly. But when it comes to alien species, we would not need such skilled make-up departments if their bodies were indistinguishable from the human form. As the chameloid Martia says in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Not everybody keeps their genitals in the same place, and one would think that science fiction scripts would occasionally reflect this sense of fundamental biological difference in some sort of fundamental linguistic difference. Would a truly alien species be able to understand our language? Would a truly alien language simply give different names to the same things in the world? Or would such a language divide the world into things differently in the first place? Might it perhaps not even work with the category of things at all? A race of disembodied, shape-shifting beings might have a language consisting of all verbs and no nouns.

Wittgenstein and the Talking Lion

These speculations are summed up brilliantly in one of Wittgenstein’s typically gnomic utterances: If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. ¹¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 -1951) was an Austrian philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers on language in the twentieth century. Through his teaching at Cambridge, England and his many publications, above all Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reoriented the way many philosophers speak about language and indeed the very way they do philosophy. Wittgenstein felt that the problems that have traditionally troubled philosophers are at bottom problems of language. In his view, our failure to understand how language really operates generates a whole series of artificial—and unnecessary—metaphysical concerns. Wittgenstein’s goal was to produce a more valid understanding of the nature of language that would lead us out of the intellectual dead-ends into which modern philosophy had in his view conducted us. As he put it, The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language (Part I, §119). Above all, Wittgenstein struggled against a conception of language that he believed vitiated all our attempts to understand ourselves and our world: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (§115).

The picture of language from which Wittgenstein hoped to escape is precisely the one that we just saw embodied in Shakespeare’s Henry V and that we will see recur in Star Trek. Wittgenstein found it expressed in St. Augustine’s account in his Confessions of how he had learned language as a child: When they (my elders) named some object . . . I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out . . . I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified. Wittgenstein articulates the conception of language implicit in Augustine: These words . . . give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.—In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands (§1).

Wittgenstein argues that this understanding of language takes for granted the very phenomenon it ought to be investigating, the articulation of the world into things in the first place. In Augustine’s account, the world of the child is already divided up naturally into things, and learning a language is merely a matter of finding out what they are called in the conventions of his society. As Wittgenstein puts it, this account may successfully characterize how we learn a second language, but it ignores what must be involved in learning a first: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one (§32).

For Wittgenstein the fundamental question is not how words correspond to things but how words are used to articulate the world into things in the first place. In the crucial move in his later philosophy, Wittgenstein sought to get away from the common notion that the meaning of a word is the thing it corresponds to,¹² and turned to the idea that a word’s meaning is to be found in the way it functions in making the world intelligible to us. In Wittgenstein’s famous formulation: "For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (§43). Wittgenstein rejects an atomistic approach to language, in which one focuses on individual words as individual units of meaning that are only gradually built up into larger units of meaning like sentences. Noting that it is sometimes difficult to tell if a given utterance is a word or a sentence (§19), Wittgenstein opts for a more holistic approach to language, in which one would begin with the larger units of significance out of which separate words are only gradually articulated.

These larger units take their meaning only in the larger context of human life and human action. In Wittgenstein’s view, only because we use language as human beings does it have any meaning at all. Wittgenstein builds the idea of use into his criterion for recognizing something as a language to begin with, as we can see in his description of a situation that sounds like a typical Star Trek episode:

Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language (§206).

Thus, in Wittgenstein’s view, our problems in understanding language arise from trying to abstract it from its larger human contexts, for example, to isolate individual words from the way they are in fact embedded in concrete utterances where they perform real functions. For Wittgenstein, language and life are inseparable: to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life (§19). To highlight the way words are to be understood in terms of the rules for using them, Wittgenstein speaks of language-games: "Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" (§22). Wittgenstein thus makes a connection between being human and using language:

It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: they do not think, and that is why they do not talk. But—they simply do not talk . . . Or to put it better: they do not use language—if we except the most primitive forms of language.—Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing (§25).

Here Wittgenstein argues that speaking a language is bound up with the distinctively human form of life, as shown by all the characteristic ways in which human beings use language in their everyday lives.

It is in this context that we must understand Wittgenstein’s seemingly enigmatic claim: If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. Humans and lions represent different forms of life, and thus if lions did use language, it would be for purposes other than those of human beings. Lions would not simply name things differently; if they did formulate concepts, they would divide up the world differently, in accordance with their different forms of life. For example, with a predator’s heightened sense of smell, lions might have a far richer olfactory vocabulary than human beings do. Thus, for Wittgenstein, moving between two languages may not be a simple matter of finding the equivalences between two sets of names. Rather, it may involve complex negotiations between two different forms of life.

Philosophical Investigations in Outer Space

Wittgenstein’s talk of different forms of life—what one might call alien life-forms—points us in the direction of science fiction. When he writes of talking animals and explorers entering strange lands, he makes us think of some of the archetypal sci-fi scenes. But science fiction writers have been reluctant to take up the challenge Wittgenstein poses to the idea of easy translation between alien languages. In its first incarnation on television, Star Trek was one of the worst offenders in this regard. The writers of the show conveniently conjured up a Universal Translator for the crew of the starship Enterprise, which made exploring strange planets easier for them, and, more importantly, made producing scripts much easier for the show’s writers. It is no wonder that the alien life-forms Captain Kirk encountered often turned out to be disappointingly familiar. In A Piece of the Action a whole planet operates by the rules of Chicago gangsters from the 1920s—indeed its inhabitants seem to have watched too many re-runs of The Untouchables.

In this, as in many other respects, Star Trek: The Next Generation marked an advance beyond its predecessor, and several of its episodes raise issues of translation—for example The Ensigns of Command in the third season and Masks in the seventh. Above all, in a fifth season episode called Darmok, the show explored the issue of alien language with a depth and a seriousness rarely seen in television or any other sci-fi medium.¹³ The episode is in fact wholly devoted to the problems of communication between two different species. As the episode opens, Captain Picard and his crew are on a mission to establish communication and perhaps trade relations with what is described as an enigmatic race, the Children of Tama. During previous encounters, their language had been called incomprehensible, and it still is—as we soon discover when the captain of the Tamarian starship offers a strange greeting to the Enterprise: Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossed roads at Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray. Like Picard, we are completely baffled by this sequence, and we look in vain for the customary subtitles that might enlighten us, the normally privileged audience, as to what this attempt at communication means.

Note that the problem here is not the usual one with foreign languages. The Universal Translator has not failed completely; we are hearing English words from the Tamarian captain—his name turns out to be Dathon—but they are still incomprehensible to us in the way they are combined. This is then the sort of language-game Wittgenstein loved to imagine—a situation where we can understand individual words, but not whole sentences, where recognizable words do not appear to be functioning in the way we normally expect. In short, the lion of Tama is speaking, but, just as Wittgenstein predicted, we cannot understand him. Picard nevertheless persists in his efforts to comprehend the alien’s words. Ever the optimist about intergalactic harmony, the captain reassures his crew: But are they truly incomprehensible? In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination. Picard’s patience and imagination are indeed about to be tested. With the enigmatic words: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra—which will be repeated many times throughout the episode and give it its name—Captain Dathon has Picard transported to the surface of the planet they are both orbiting, El-Adrel IV.

For the rest of the episode, Picard, the remaining crew of the Enterprise, and we as audience only gradually figure out how the Tamarian language functions. At considerable risk to himself, Captain Dathon has created a situation which he hopes will teach Picard how to speak Tamarian. After several frustrating failures at communication, Dathon achieves his first success when he offers to share his fire using the words: Temba. His arms wide. Evidently a good Augustinian, Picard begins with the view of language Wittgenstein rejected. He wants to know the objects Dathon is referring to with his words. Hence Picard’s initial reaction: Temba? What does that mean? Fire? Does Temba mean ‘fire’? Picard is at first a captive of the one word-one thing model of language. But Dathon’s frustration with this conclusion leads Picard to start thinking on the level not of the individual word but of the whole utterance and thus to reconsider how Temba functions in their concrete situation: Temba is a person? His arms wide. Because he’s . . . he’s holding them apart in . . . in . . . generosity? In giving? In taking? Picard can do a better job of deciphering Tamarian than the ship’s computer because he is placed in the same circumstances as Dathon and can recognize what the alien captain is trying to accomplish with his words. In true Wittgensteinian fashion, the meaning of Temba. His arms wide is not the set of objects the words refer to but their use.

Picard’s understanding of the Tamarian language deepens when he grasps why Dathon has been using the words: Shaka. When the walls fell every time their attempts to communicate go awry. Picard speculates: Shaka . . . Is that a failure? An inability to do something? His ultimate realization of how Tamarian works as a language comes in a flash of insight as he tries to follow Dathon’s instructions about fighting the beast that is about to attack them: That’s how you communicate, isn’t it—by citing example. By metaphor! Picard’s insight elicits from Dathon what is evidently the Tamarian equivalent of By George, I think he’s got it!, namely: Sokath. His eyes uncovered! Mixing in Greek for good measure, the stage direction in the script at this point reads: (eureka!).

The mysterious words in Dathon’s utterances were not the names of objects, but rather proper nouns—the names of persons and places out of Tamarian myth and history. Darmok and Jalad, for example, were two heroes who fought side-by-side on the island of Tanagra, and forged a friendship by facing a common foe. Dathon hoped that a similar bond would develop between him and Picard as they fought together against a beast on El-Adrel IV. This episode thus shows how deeply cultural a phenomenon language is. Words are not rooted in a world of self-subsistent objects in nature that might make them equally intelligible to all rational beings. Rather words are rooted in a people’s distinctive culture, their specific history and mythology, which shape the categories with which they understand their world. In Darmok a language is embedded in a form of life.

The simultaneous and parallel investigation into Tamarian conducted in Picard’s absence by the Enterprise crew comes up with similar results and fills in our understanding of how the language operates. After searching linguistic databases on the ship’s computer, Lieutenant Commander Data and Counselor Troi are ready to give an erudite lecture on Tamarian to Commander Riker. Somehow Data has already been able to conclude: The Tamarian ego structure does not seem to allow what we normally think of as self-identity—another attempt to relate a language to a form of life. In a particularly Wittgensteinian moment, Data says: The situation is analogous to understanding the grammar of a language but none of the vocabulary.

What Every Tamarian Needs to Know

The mention of vocabulary here links Darmok to another intellectual issue, one which had a good deal more currency than Wittgenstein’s later philosophy at the time the episode aired. In 1987 E.D. Hirsch Jr. published a book called Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which quickly became a bestseller and sparked a heated controversy throughout the United States (Hirsch appeared on national television several times to discuss the book, even on the Phil Donahue Show, which is more than Wittgenstein ever did). Hirsch made a powerful argument against the widespread belief that education can be content-free, that our duty is to teach children modes of learning and knowing but not any specific items of knowledge. In his studies of reading, Hirsch uncovered a great deal of evidence that contradicts this view.

Hirsch found that reading is not simply an abstract skill, something that is fully acquired once one has learned the alphabet, rules of grammar, and other means for decoding written messages. The ability to read is contingent on developing vocabulary, and that vocabulary includes historical and cultural data that a particular society assumes as common knowledge among its members. When a newspaper refers to George Washington, for example, it does not feel obliged to gloss the name as first President of the United States (whereas a mention of Millard Fillmore would inevitably be joined with Thirteenth U.S. President). Someone reading that newspaper who knows who George Washington was will obviously be able to read it faster and with greater comprehension than someone who does not. What Hirsch calls cultural literacy thus becomes essential to understanding common discourse whether in speech or in print.

Hirsch illustrates the principle of cultural literacy with a personal anecdote:

My father used to write business letters that alluded to Shakespeare. These allusions were effective for conveying complex messages to his associates, because, in his day, business people could make such allusions with every expectation of being understood. For instance, in my father’s commodity business, the timing of sales and purchases was all-important, and he would sometimes write or say to his colleagues, There is a tide, without further elaboration. Those four words carried not only a lot of complex information, but also the persuasive force of a proverb. In addition to the basic practical meaning, Act now! what came across was a lot of implicit reasons why immediate action was important.¹⁴

If one pictures E.D. Hirsch Sr. saying Brutus and Cassius at Sardis on the floor of the Memphis Cotton Exchange, one has a perfect illustration of how the Tamarian language works and why it is so effective for those who have the knowledge to make it work.

Appearing in 1991, while people from prominent educators to government officials were still arguing passionately over Hirsch’s book, Darmok raises the issue of cultural literacy exactly in his terms. In order to understand what the Tamarians say, the Enterprise crew lacks, not the general rules of the Tamarian language, but the specific cultural content that supplies the context in which all Tamarian utterances become meaningful. In a display of cultural literacy itself—quite amazing for a commercial television program—Darmok raises the related issue of Great Books. Some of those who followed Hirsch in championing the cause of cultural literacy also advocated a Great Books curriculum on the college level, in order to make students familiar with Shakespeare and other foundational authors in our cultural tradition.¹⁵

As if alluding to this aspect of the controversy, Darmok includes several scenes that celebrate the cultural heritage of the human race. When Troi is trying to illustrate how Tamarian works, she chooses an example from Shakespeare: Juliet on her balcony, which her colleague Beverly Crusher explains is an image of romance. When Dathon is dying, he wants Picard to tell him one of the stories that has a meaning for his own people. Reluctantly at first, Picard is soon eloquently relating the tale of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian narrative that stands at the fountainhead of the epic tradition. As a story of Gilgamesh’s problematic friendship with Enkidu, this epic is particularly appropriate in the circumstances. By the time Picard is finished, the phrase Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk, with its distinctly Tamarian ring, stands ready to enter the alien vocabulary as a new way of saying friendship in extremity.

In an even more pointed moment, at the very end of the episode, Riker finds Picard reading a book in ancient Greek. Picard explains: The Homeric hymns—one of the root metaphors of our own culture. The lesson in multiculturalism Picard has learned from his encounter with the Tamarians has not weakened his attachment to his own culture. On the contrary, as he thinks of future encounters with the Tamarians, it only strengthens his desire to know his own roots: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. A defender of the Great Books like Allan Bloom could not have put it better. The irony is striking: although television has often been blamed for the decline in cultural literacy, in Darmok we witness a television program explaining the need for cultural literacy and championing our heritage of Great Books. No wonder Star Trek in its many incarnations kept returning to Shakespeare for inspiration. As Picard counsels Data in The Defector when he plays Henry V: Data . . . You’re here to learn about the human condition. And there is no better way of doing that than by embracing Shakespeare.

Never Underestimate a TV Writer

With its sophisticated awareness of some of the subtlest problems in the philosophy of language, Darmok represents a remarkable moment in television history. I am not claiming that the writers of the episode—Joe Menosky and Philip LaZebnik—had Wittgenstein in mind, but I would not put it past them.¹⁶ Or they might have been inspired by the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (no relation to the Klingon officer Mr. Worf on board the Enterprise—at least none that I know of). Whorf’s studies of the complex tenses and other aspects of Native American languages such as Hopi raise many of the issues that Wittgenstein highlights, above all the way a language embodies a distinct worldview and system of categorizing reality.¹⁷

But whatever theorists of language guided Menosky and LaZebnik, the main point is that—contrary to our stereotype of television writers as ignorant hacks—they are both highly educated, Menosky with a degree from Pomona College and LaZebnik from Harvard. Menosky began his career as a journalist. He was a science editor and reporter with Morning Edition and All Things Considered on National Public Radio and wrote extensively on scientific and technological issues for such journals as MIT’s Technology Review. LaZebnik’s credentials are even more relevant to the linguistic aspects of Darmok and perhaps explain how an ancient work like the Epic of Gilgamesh made a rare appearance on a weekly television show. LaZebnik’s field at Harvard was Classics, and his senior honors thesis was on the highly arcane subject of Homer’s music. Since the music to Homer’s epics does not in fact exist anymore, LaZebnik’s exploration of the topic was in a way an early exercise in fantasy and science fiction for him.

Despite the evident erudition that goes into writing Star Trek, or perhaps precisely because of it, fans love to find errors in the scripts. The Net is filled with various forms of nitpicking about Darmok, such as the question: How could a civilization with such a poetic—and seemingly unscientific—language ever have succeeded in building a starship?¹⁸ If one really wanted to nit-pick, one might ask: Why would Picard think even for a moment that Temba means knife, when the Universal Translator would have rendered it as such if it did? One cannot expect thoroughgoing logical consistency from a television episode, and, despite a few questionable aspects of the script, the writers of Darmok are to be applauded for operating well above the normal level of television fare. If, upon repeated viewing, the episode may seem heavy-handed in its exposition, we must remember that it was, like all weekly television, essentially designed for first-time viewing. And I recall being bowled over when I saw its first-run broadcast. With no preparation, I, like most viewers I’m sure, found the dialogue astonishingly opaque. I remember thinking to myself: "Can they really be doing this on television? It’s like broadcasting Finnegans Wake."

What most struck me after first viewing the episode was the respect the show displayed for its audience. It relied on them to stick with the episode despite their bewilderment and to await as